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321 Pages·2011·5.06 MB·English

The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere
An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society
J i i rgen Habermas
translated by Thomas Burger
with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Fifth printing, 1993
First MIT Press paperback edition, 1991
This translation © 1989 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This work originally appeared in German under the Title Struklurwandel der
Üffrntlkheit, © 1962 Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied,
Federal Republic or Germany.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retiieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This hook was typeset by DEKR Corporation and was printed and bound
in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Habermas, Jürgen.
The structural transformation of the public sphere.
(Studies in contemporary German social thought)
Translation of: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Sociology—Methodology. 2. Social Structure.
3. Middle classes. 4. Political sociology. I. Title.
II. Series.
HM24.H2713 1989 305 88-13456
ISBN 0-262-08180-6 (haidcover) 0 262-58108-6 (paperback)
To Wolfgang Abendroth in gratitude
Contents
Introduction by Thomas McCarthy xi
Translator's Note xv
Author's Preface xvii
I Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a
Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere
1 The Initial Question 1
2 Remarks on the Type of Representative
Publicness 5
3 On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere 14
II Social Structures of the Public Sphere
4 The Basic Blueprint 27
5 Institutions of the Public Sphere 31
6 The Bourgeois Family and the
Institutionalization of a Privateness Oriented to an
Audience 43
7 The Public Sphere in the World of Letters in
Relation to the Public Sphere in the Political Realm 51
VII]
Contents
III Political Functions of the Public Sphere
8 The Model Case of British Development 57
9 The Continental Variants 67
10 Civil Society as the Sphere of Private
Autonomy: Private Law and a Liberalized Market 73
11 The Contradictory Institutionalization of the
Public Sphere in the Bourgeois Constitutional State 79
IV The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and
Ideology
12 Public Opinion—Opinion Publique—Öffentliche
Meinung :On the Prehistory of the Phrase 89
13 Publicity as the Bridging Principle between
Politics and Morality (Kant) 102
14 On the Dialectic of the Public Sphere (Hegel
and Marx) 117
15 The Ambivalent View of the Public Sphere in
the Theory of Liberalism (John Stuart Mill and
Alexis de Tocqueville) 129
V The Social-Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere
16 The Tendency toward a Mutual Infiltration of
Public and Private Spheres 141
17 The Polarization of the Social Sphere and the
Intimate Sphere 151
18 From a Culture-Debating (lculturräsonierend)
Public to a Culture-Consuming Public 159
19 The Blurred Blueprint: Bevelopmental
Pathways in the Disintegration of the Bourgeois
Public Sphere 175
ix
Contents
VI The Transformation of the Public Sphere's
Political Function
20 From the Journalism of Private Men of Letters
to the Public Consumer Services of the Mass Media:
The Public Sphere as a Platform for Advertising 181
21 The Transmuted Function of the Principle of
Publicity 196
22 Manufactured Publicity and Nonpublic Opinion:
T h e Voting Behavior of the Population 211
23 The Political Public Sphere and the
Transformation of the Liberal Constitutional State
into a Social-Welfare State 222
VII On the Concept of Public Opinion
24 Public Opinion as a Fiction of Constitutional
Law—and the Social-Psychological Liquidation of
the Concept 236
25 A Sociological Attempt at Clarification 244
Notes 251
Index 299
Introduction
There is no good reason why S t r u k t u r dw earOn fd feeln t l i c h k m t ,
one of Habermas's most influential and widely translated
works, should not have appeared in English sooner. That
would likely have facilitated the reception of his thought
among Anglo-American scholars by showing how the more
abstract and theoretical concerns of his later work arose out of
the concrete issues raised in this study. T h eS t r u c t uTrraal n osrf -
m a t i oonf t h eP u b l iScp h e rise a historical-sociological account of
the emergence, transformation, and disintegration of the bour-
geois public sphere. It combines materials and methods from
sociology and economics, law and political science, and social
and cultural history in an effort to grasp the preconditions,
structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain
of modern society. As a sphere between civil society and the
state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general
interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere
took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a devel-
oping market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bu-
reaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergen I
bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the
ruler's power was merely represented b e f o trhe people with a
sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through
informed and critical discourse by the people.
Habermas traces the interdependent development of the
literary and political self-consciousness of this new class, weav-
ing together accounts of the rise of the novel and of literary